Meadow near Oosterbeek

In the summers of the 1860s a group of painters gathered at Oosterbeek, in the Dutch province of Gelderland, to work directly from nature. The village sits where the wooded hills of the Veluwe drop into the wide, low valley of the Rhine, and the Romantic painters of the previous generation had loved that contrast of height and flatness. Gerard Bilders, who signed and dated this canvas in 1860, when he was in his early twenties, looked the other way. He chose the ordinary meadows on the Rhine floodplain. Cattle lie resting in the shade of pollard willows, more cows graze out on the flat grass, and a low line of trees closes the horizon under a big, soft sky. The painting came to the Rijksmuseum with the bequest of the Haarlem collector J.B.A.M. Westerwoudt.